


Soul Like a Knife

by scioscribe



Category: Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Trans Character, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 20:15:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13061361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: He called her Shosanna.  That means the woman who forged her papers did it well enough to pass SS inspection.  If she is still alive, and if Shosanna can make it to Paris in order to find her, she can buy yet another new name.





	Soul Like a Knife

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gaialux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gaialux/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!

The bitterest victory is Hans Landa saying her name.  Running for her life, Shosanna feels like the animal he says she is, though not rat but rabbit, all racing heart and springing muscles; it is only later, in the woods outside the LaPedite farm, with the stains of mud and damp grass on her dress, two broken toenails, and a scratch under her eye from a sharp and whipcord-thin branch, that she thinks to do anything besides run.  And even then at first she only cries, and hates that she cannot trust the distance she’s made enough to risk a scream.

But very gradually it comes to her.

He called her Shosanna.  That means the woman who forged her papers did it well enough to pass SS inspection.  If she is still alive, and if Shosanna can make it to Paris in order to find her, she can buy yet another new name.

When he took everything from her, he gave her something to hold onto.  She is not grateful.  She would like to rip out the tongue he used to speak such perfect French.

 

 

“It used to be only a ticket-making machine,” the woman says, as they watch Shosanna’s new identity come into the world with the thick smells of ink and hot paper.  “I refined it over the years.  Listen to me, girl.”  She calls Shosanna “girl” because she is impatient with having to remember more than one name.  She is an impatient woman generally, impatient and thin, kept alive by cigarettes and black coffee and spite.  But she took Shosanna in when Shosanna came, and though Shosanna was only looking for papers, she gave her a bed and an empty theater to wander through at night.

Sometimes she settles into the dusty velvet seat in some back row and looks at a blank white screen; she fills it up with her dreams.  Blood features prominently.

“I’m listening.”

“I’m trying to teach you how to live in the world.  You have to know how to do things.  You’re pretty enough that you wouldn’t have to if things were different, but things are even less different now than they were before.  Maybe later you’ll find a rich man to take you up, if this damn war ever ends.”

She cannot think of being taken up, acquired like some artifact.  She lived her whole life in the country: her hands are strong from milking cows and soft only because sometimes she would steal the butter to rub it into her skin.  She doesn’t want to be looked at.  She likes the theater, where sooner or later, the lights always go down.  She says none of this, though, because she is not yet alive enough to argue.

“But who needs one?” the woman concludes.  “Skills are better.  A woman who has nothing to talk about has very few things she’ll be asked to do with her mouth, no matter how well she puts her lipstick on.”

It is a few months before Shosanna says, “And who are these men that I’m supposed to talk to about printing counterfeit papers?”

The woman, whose name is Ada, has a laugh that sounds like film stock starting to burn.  (Sometimes, though not often, they burn reels of films Riefenstahl has spoken of fondly.  Never their only copies.  God forbid they not be able to produce some influence, or the source of some homage, at the random inclination of a Gestapo thug.)  “The kinds who help you do it.  But don’t worry, girl, I think now, by the time someone catches your eye, you’ll be able to talk about running the theater.  That will do for any kind of man.”

This is true: it’s a year later when she meets Marcel.  Ada has been dead for three months.  Shosanna still hangs black crepe over the posters of her favorites, as if Renoir--“The smug bastard,” Ada always said with affection--mourns for her too.

She knew for years that she was listed as Ada’s niece--“It’s simpler,” Ada said--and she knew for months that she would have the theater when Ada was gone, but she was not prepared to hear the will read, to hear, “To my beloved niece Emmanuelle.”   _Beloved_.

 

 

Marcel is her beloved.  Even to him, Shosanna doesn’t talk much.  Landa spoiled talking: he spoke so prettily and so politely and in the end, he killed them, she knows, with a gesture.  She has looked up all the English words for death and murder and gunfire and she remembers none of them from the jumble of his talk.  She learned English because of him.  She believes that he pointed, that he killed them with a gesture.

Words are meaningless but names are not.  It matters to her to be Shosanna.  It doesn’t matter to her to be Emmanuelle, but it matters to her to be a Mimieux, at least in this place: Ada’s name is like a cameo worn at her throat.  What she calls Marcel matters, then, and she has only one name now for those she loves.  She is not sentimental and she is not academic, she is mostly uninterested in precision, in the fabled hundred words for snow.  This one extra word, this  _beloved_ , is enough.  Most days even his name alone is enough.  She can feel his love warm the floorboards around their bed so that her feet will be warm as she paces at night, so very pure are his intentions, so much would he take care of her.

She is aware that she cannot love him that much.  Her heart is leather.

So in the dark, she traces the shape of him, from his forehead to all the way down his nose, and she says, “I love you,” because it’s true, and she doesn’t go on to say that she loves him so much she wishes she could cut her heart open so there would be room enough and tenderness enough for her to love him more, because she wants to be kind.  She doesn’t want him to know.

He probably already knows.  She has no secrets from him, not really.

 

 

This is how they fall in love:

“You take yourself too seriously,” she says.

He laughs.  “I never thought I’d hear you say that about anyone.”

“It’s midnight,” Shosanna says, “and the best reason to own a theater is to use it when no one else can.  Pick something, anything, and put it on for us, then come down and watch with me.”

They are at least friends--they are friends enough for him to have stood beside the ticket-making machine and listened to her explain, step-by-step, how to coax it into becoming something else, friends enough for him to sometimes, without commentary, bring her things his friends in the black market have turned up, nylons and chocolates and, once, a glossy photograph of Gary Cooper in a tuxedo, the man’s signature scrawled almost lazily across his form like a new kind of waistcoat.  He won’t let him pay her for any of it.  He calls it rent, as though letting him sleep on the cot in the projection room has some cost she needs to recoup.  For the nylons and the chocolates, she could almost believe that.  But no one pays their rent with a picture of Gary Cooper.  That, she knows beyond a doubt, is a gift.  So they’re friends.

“It’ll be an eternity between reels if you have to wait for me to come up and down every time to change things.”

 _So choose something short_ , she almost says, but at the last minute, she decides to flirt.  It feels as wobbly as a new bicycle.  “I could wait an eternity for you, in the right mood.”  Then she veers toward practicality.  “Anyway, we can take turns, it’s not like I don’t know how to do it myself.”

Marcel chooses _Vampyr_ , which makes her laugh.

“This isn’t anyone’s favorite Dreyer!” she calls up to him.

“It’s mine,” he says, unruffled, coming down the steps.  “I grew up in Courtempierre, I used to play in that mill, the one at the end.”

“And did you ever see any vampires?”

“Constantly,” Marcel says, and now he is close to her and his smile makes her conscious of the rise and fall of her breath and the racing of the blood in her veins.  “And the dancing shadows.”

The film is not long and they are only halfway through it when he takes her hand.  Nervous, she can think of nothing to say, and she is too inexperienced to know that there is no need to say anything, so she says, “Your hands are soft.”

“I live a life of luxury,” he says, and first he leans to kiss her and then he does kiss her, and his mouth is as soft as his hands.

Shosanna used to worry about her softness, try to rid herself of it, as if it were a bluntness she could hone away like her body and soul were the knife edges in need of sharpening.  Then, later, she worried she was not soft enough, that her jawline or hips or anger would give her away.  Marcel seems like someone who has never worried about anything.  Even among the Germans, he is sometimes afraid but never self-loathing.  If his soul is a knife, like hers, he has never turned it upon himself.  All the best parts of him are still there.  He is given away; he gives himself away.

“Stop,” she says softly, sliding her hand between them, her palm against his chest, and he stops.  She tries to think of what to say.  She smiles, a smile that feels rusted.  “You should know that I’m a vampire.  I can’t be seen in daylight.”

Marcel touches her cheek.

She says, “I am not the kind of woman one can be seen with in daylight.  Do you understand?”

“Right now, the Germans don’t like me much either,” he says, and she knows he has guessed part of it but not all of it.

She doesn’t know what the hell she’s supposed to say.  All the times she let herself think about him, she skipped this part of the conversation entirely.

 _I’m a boy_ , she almost says, but the word is as bitter on her tongue as lemon rind, and it feels even less true now than it did before.  In Paris, she sometimes wears trousers and pageboy caps, and even so, everyone still calls her mademoiselle, they always know at once.  Paris loves women, as her mother would have said.  No matter the lipstick, as Ada would have said.  And even if she had been a boy once, she is old enough now that she would be a man, if she were a man, and that feels stranger still.

Then somehow her silence goes on long enough that it becomes its own kind of answer, right or wrong, and Marcel nods.  “And if I still want to kiss you, Shosanna?”

She gives herself to him.  “Then do it.”

He does.

 

 

In the end, bleeding out, she dies thinking, _He will still drop the match._ She means to think that she loves him, but she doesn’t have time.  She wants to believe that this trust is more primal, that it is the true name and love is only what it’s sometimes called.

 _He will drop the match_.  She remembers hiding under the floorboards: the way she would lie on her back and then stretch her legs until her feet were flat against the underside of the floor.  The way she would push until the boards creaked.  The danger was that she would break something, that she would break through.  If she does that now, he will be there.  He's just on the other side of the screen, on the other side of the crowd, and when she has gotten through all of this, he will be there.


End file.
